Maybe such a scene never really happened, maybe it did. No matter. One imagines that such a scene or similar ones were in the minds of the 76% of the Cherokee Nation who voted last week to strip non-Cherokees of membership in the tribe.

This story actually starts back in 1838 in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia when the feds forced the Cherokees to migrate to Oklahoma. When the Cherokees left their traditional lands, some took their black slaves with them.

Then, when slavery was abolished, the blacks were given citizenship in the Cherokee nation. Today, there are almost 3,000 descendents of these freed slaves living with the Cherokees in Oklahoma.

If the vote stands to limit membership in the tribe to those with Cherokee blood, it will be primarily these descendents of black slaves who will be booted out of the tribe, but others including some whites and some members of other Indian tribes will also be affected.

Cherokees, no less than any other distinct peoples, are what they are because of their genes. And, it seems the Cherokees understand this.

If pureblood male and female Cherokees mate--23 Cherokee chromosomes from the male and 23 from the female join. At that moment of joining--when there are 46 chromosomes together, the life process starts its trajectory that will result in the birth of a new full blooded, genuine Cherokee.

Mating within your group--like with like--is the way all distinct peoples keep from going extinct. There's no other way to do it.

Of course, over the past 100 or so years, there has been a lot of intermarriage among Cherokees, just as among other distinct peoples, as the insane blending philosophy of this age has caused people to not see themselves or their people as being unique and worth preserving.

It's not difficult to see how a people goes extinct through the bedroom genocide of mating outside the group.

A pureblood Cherokee mates with a black or a white or an Asian and the child produced is only half Cherokee i.e. the new child has 23 Cherokee chromosomes and 23 non-Cherokee Chromosomes. Then, if that child grows up and mates with a non-Cherokee, the child born is only one quarter Cherokee. If that child also mates with a non-Cherokee the next child is only one eighth Cherokee. Then it becomes one sixteenth and so on. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the rough idea.

Soon, you have a tribe of "Indians" who, depending on how the mating went, may look like Scandinavians or African-Americans or whatever.

The blond, blue eyed Scandinavian Cherokees may put feathers on their heads, but they sure as hell aren't Cherokees no matter what they call themselves. Their genes have been too watered down.

If you don't look Cherokee, you're not Cherokee. Same with all other peoples. Trust your eyes.

So, what's to be done to save the Cherokees from extinction? The Cherokees, themselves, have to want to save themselves. No one else is going to do it for them. This vote, if it stands, could be a big step away from extinction.

Of course, to really stave off extinction the Cherokees have to have their consciousness raised even higher as to who is a Cherokee and who isn't. If the right level of consciousness is achieved, social taboos against breeding outside the group should foster some reproductive isolation.

And, with reproductive isolation will come a folding back in of those members of the tribe who may have mixed blood, so that the mixed blood will begin reversing itself in a sort of distillation process.

What the Cherokees are trying to do is to go back to a period before miscegenation and alien genes were inserted into their tribe and start from there. In other words, they want to go back to a time before the fork in the road that led to their tribe now having many non-Cherokees as members.

With their vote on expelling non-Cherokees from the tribe, the Cherokees said that only those who can show that they are blood descendents of those who were on the Cherokee rolls back in about 1898 can be members of the tribe.

Now, obviously, the genes of some who are descended from those on the old Cherokee rolls may have been watered down in some lines over the past hundred or so years, but if the Cherokees hold firm with their vote even though they are being called racists, and if they stand up to the pressure of the blenders, then they may be able to revive themselves as a distinct people.

In 2000, the Seminoles did something similar to what the Cherokees are now trying, but then the feds cut off federal money that the Seminoles had been receiving and the Seminoles caved in. In effect, the Seminoles accepted money to commit their own genocide.

Will the Cherokees sell their genes for money? Time will tell.

You may not hear many Cherokees talking about this in the terms I've used here, but, if you cut through the sagebrush, this really is about self-identification, self-determination and survival as a distinct people. And, there are lessons here for all distinct peoples who want to survive the blending that is being forced on humanity.

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THREE BOOKS BY HARD TO PIGEONHOLE H. MILLARD

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messages of ennui and meaning in post-american america by H. Millard
In Ourselves Alone and Homeless Jack's Religion, H. Millard, the hard to pigeonhole author of The Outsider and Roaming the Wastelands, has put together some of his category bending commentaries on post-American America. The commentaries deal with politics, philosophy, free speech, genocide, religion and other topics in Millard's edgy style and lead up to Homeless Jack's Religion, in which Homeless Jack lays out revelations he found in a dumpster on skid row. Browse Before You BuyISBN: 0-595-32646-3